Perspectives in 2012

A recently released satellite data set calls into question not only our understanding of observed stratospheric climate change but also our ability to simulate it.

Considerable confusion exists as to the most likely value of climate sensitivity; by proposing a consistent framework for analysing and synthesizing research into the palaeoclimate of the past 65 million years, a value of 2.2–4.8 °C warming in response to atmospheric CO₂ doubling is obtained, in agreement with IPCC estimates.

Deficiencies in methods reporting in animal experimentation lead to difficulties in reproducing experiments; the authors propose a set of reporting standards to improve scientific communication and study design.

Engineering influenza viruses to study human adaptation is a controversial area of research, with opinions diverging over the wisdom of publishing the full results of such studies.

A review of allergic host defences argues that allergic immunity has an important role in host defence against noxious environmental substances.

The hidden-reservoir explanation for the non-chondritic composition of the accessible Earth is inconsistent with the heat carried by mantle plumes, which suggests that the whole Earth is not chondritic, perhaps due to preferential loss of crusts from precursor bodies by collisional erosion during accretion.

Scientific reproducibility now very often depends on the computational method being available to duplicate, so here it is argued that all source code should be freely available.